Can we be toxic while healing?

Just because we are healing doesn't mean life catches up with us. Today, we will talk about how you can be in therapy, journaling, and setting boundaries… and still repeating toxic patterns. You’ll get: red flags to watch in yourself, antidotes, and maybe learn how to call in softness to yourself and your relationships. 

Things I’ve read and citations:

Gottman, J., & Schwartz Gottman, J. (2016). Level 1 clinical training: Gottman method couples therapy. The Gottman Institute.

Hammer, M., & Hammer, B. (2015). Healing our emotional pain and relationship pain. Journal of Psychology & Clinical Psychiatry, 2(5), 00091.

Pinkston, S. N. (2023). Dialect Behavior Therapy's Effects on the Therapeutic Reduction of Self-Destructive Behavior and Cognitive Processes. Praptiningsih, N. A., Mulyono, H., & Setiawan, B. (2024). Toxic relationship in youth communication through self-love intervention strategy. Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies, 14(2), e202416.

Turpin, A. S. (2024). Healing from Toxic Relationships in Marriage, Dating and Interpersonal Connections.

Wisniewska, M. J. (2024, November 18). 11 Signs of a Toxic Relationship You Do Not Want to Ignore. Break the Cycle. Retrieved August 25, 2025, from https://www.breakthecycle.org/signs-of-a-toxic-relationship/

Wisniewska, M. J. (2024, October 15). 11 Early Signs of a Controlling Man: Never Ignore These Red Flags. Break the Cycle. Retrieved August 25, 2025, from https://www.breakthecycle.org/early-signs-of-a-controlling-man.

cover art: bofenglin

Transcript

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If you're Latina like me, I know you've heard of La Toxica. The toxic one. She's sexy, she's erotic, she's hypersexual, she's jealous, she's possessive, and yes, vengeful. We don't only know her, we perform her. We vilify ourselves as toxic. Anytime we're angry, or maybe we're just listening to Good Cheese May, maybe we even dub ourselves as toxicas to be part of the cool kids. Con las otras venenosas. We buy Etsy merch with the words toxica print in bold and we wear it like a badge. Our friend groups either bask in it or they completely condemn it when it does not benefit them. And if it's not our friends, it's social media. Straight men fetishizing domestic violence. When women are being arrested for domestic violence, if you look in the comments, you'll see she did nothing wrong. He wanted it. If you see me being yelled at the club by Latina, leave me alone. I'm right where I want to be. It's an identity, it's a joke, it's an archetype, it's a club, and it's a fetish. And listen, I've played into it. I've justified my own previous toxic behaviors with lines with don't be his peace. Be Hispanic. What do you mean? I'm Latina. I'm just being Latina. Or, you know, I'll say I'm Colombian because I just love that Colombian stereotype, right? And it's so dark and it carries such dark consequences. In my caseload, most of my caseload is actually men. I found myself slowly becoming a specialist in men's mental health. It just happened. It can be from my history of being a substance abuse counselor. Substance abuse counseling tends to be male-heavy caseload, and a lot of them followed me to sex therapy. And I will talk about that in another episode, how that happened. But in my caseload, I have so many men with symptoms and even diagnoses of PTSD from emotional, physical, and yes, even sexual abuse that they experience from Las Toxicas. And many times I'm the first and only person they ever share their abuse with. And as I'm holding space, listening, sometimes even crying with them, I don't only feel this need to like hold them, like hold them together. But a lot of times I also have to apologize because after those sessions, I have to look into the mirror and I have to even look at my own toxic behavior in ways that I need to change. So while I'm holding space, a lot of times these clients of mine, they'll tell me the times that they asked for help. They mentioned it to their friends. And the response, you can, as you can imagine, the responses are like, she's Latina. This is what you asked for. This is what you ordered. If you don't like the smoke, don't order the spice. This is what you wanted. Or like just a brush off, like, yeah. And it's just, it's so disappointing to hear because it just adds to the overwhelming shame when it comes out all the abuse that they have endured, sometimes even for years. And on the flip side, I've sat with women who have told me about partners who rage baited them, pushed and provoked them until they exploded. And when they did explode, they feel this overwhelming helplessness and hopelessness because the response is always met with like, see, I knew it. Latinas are all crazy. Typical Latina. And I've even heard this from women of just when they're passionate about something, when they're upset of the state of the world. And if you're Latino and there's a lot of things going on in the Latino community, I think it's normal to feel impassioned. But to dub it that anger as crazy, it can feel like I'm fighting against the tide. Like my own anger, it's constantly being tested and tugged out of me. As if a Latino has no choice but to be crazy. So, as my act of defiance, I invite you to today's episode and I call into question how do we call in softness and healing into our relationships? How do we heal from our own toxic behaviors? And maybe most importantly, can we heal while being toxic? Welcome to Things I'm Meant to Say Naked, a podcast about mental health, desire, intimacy, and the treats that we carry in our bodies. I'm Vicks, a certified sex therapist, a licensed mental counselor, a lover, and someone who has spent way too much time thinking and turning them into your career. Some episodes will be just me offering insight, stories, and spicy tasting. So get comfy and let's get into the things that we were meant to say naked. Although this podcast explores themes of mental health, relationships, and sexuality, it's for educational and entertainment purposes only, and is not a substitute for professional mental health care. If you find yourself struggling, please reach out to a licensed provider in your area. So I want to start by asking the hard question. It's not about anybody else. It's about ourselves. Am I toxic? So la toxica? I I want you to genuinely ask yourself this. And it's a hard question. It's not a simple yes or no. Because, quite frankly, no one wants to accept that we may be the villain in someone else's story. We we talk about this a lot in couples canceling, how there's like multiple realities. There's one partner's reality, there's another partner's reality, and then there's like the reality, and we try to get as close as possible to the reality. But to do that, we also have to add validity to the perspective of others. And that is real in itself, and sometimes it's very real that we ourselves are toxic. Somos las malas, las venenosas. When we talk about toxicity, I'm not really gonna go into domestic violence because that is a whole different topic. But I will say it like this is that a lot of these traits that I am about to talk about, you will also find in domestic violence, in particular emotional abuse. But I really want you to look at it and see yourself whether or not you portray these behaviors, these attitudes in your romantic relationships, but more importantly, in your friendships. I'm a firm, firm believer that the most important relationship that you have is the one with your community. And an integral part of our community is our friendships. A lot of times our friendships is our chosen family. I want you to observe this in our in yourself, but also around you. We have a saying, it's a Latin saying, tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are. So sometimes we may pick up some of these toxic traits from the people around you, and I really I want you to observe that. I um highly encourage you while listening to today's episode to journal, we're gonna get into it. I also want to add that as I'm going over this list, I will give some antidotes that are based on research, um, clinical practice, and some of them, very few of them, I won't give an antidote, but that's because I think this is something that you need to address in therapy, and maybe I'm giving you more reasons to seek a professional. So the first one is bad mouthing, criticism, belooing, and cheese me. Cheese me sounds so light. Cheese me. Cheese me means gossip, but I like how it sounds in Spanish better, especially the connotation. It's like I love Oh my god, you see that? That was a little toxic. I was gonna be like, I love being called chismosa. I even have a bag that says professional chismosa. Professional gossip. My family thinks that being a psychotherapist just means you're a gossip doctor. See, I still have some things I need to work through. Clearly, I'm not perfect. But one of my biggest observations I make in my own friendships is just like how often we literally lean into conversations. I've had it like that conversation would just be talk talking about like art, music, whatever. And as soon as someone brings up the personal life, the private life of someone that's not in that group or just not present that day, like everybody just kind of like physically leans in to listen, to give their take. And a lot of times I found myself listening of just how private this is. This is something that I would actually only tell a close friend, like my two to three close friends, I would I wouldn't want the whole group to know. And while the conversation is revolving around that information, I can't help but think about like how did they get that information? It's either like some really in-depth snooping and sleuthing. You know, maybe they're just really good. Or someone was being vulnerable. And as soon as I thought about someone being vulnerable and allowing themselves to trust a friend, and that friend is using it for clout and entertainment, I got such an incredible and considerable ick. I can generally say I don't engage in cheese mate as much as people believe I do. I actually tend to leave the conversation or like kind of like check out. I'm gonna share why, like maybe the the checking out was not the best idea, it's not, but not engaging it is actually one of the antidotes for this toxic behavior. So the problem with cheese make, gossiping, bad mouthing, criticism is that it does chip away a person's self-worth and ability to trust. I can tell when you have spoken about me. So can the people around you. I remember the way my heart dropped when someone slipped that they knew something. I didn't tell them about myself, but they heard from somebody else. It made me reconsider that whole friendship. Yes, there is an antidote for this. Obviously, the antidotes just don't engage in gossip like myself, but also uh Julie and John Gottman, there are these two, there it's a couple from Washington. They've been doing research on couples longer than I've been alive. And they identified four things in a relationship that generally ends a relationship. They call it the four horsemen. And thankfully, they also identify the antidote for these four horsemen and two of these horsemen, which is called criticism and contempt, seeing someone less than, it's also treating someone less than. And in this case, I will put cheese male in that category. And they say the antidote is to use eye statements, eye language, and expressing positive traits towards that person. So this can look like maybe said friendship group are talking about my podcast. Who's Figs and who does she think she is starting this sex therapy podcast? I don't know. I'm just curious what people are saying. So, yeah, I still have some toxicity in me that I need to work through. I would hope, maybe after listening to this podcast, since they're so interested in talking about it, is to say, like, you know, I would like to hear from Figs about this new podcast. She's very hardworking. She probably like worked hard on it. I would like to hear her journey, right? It adds a third-person perspective on things. And on top of that, add some positive traits towards me. The next thing I would like to talk about is inconsistent behavior, flaking, unrealistic expectations. Do many of my actions and words just don't line up? Do I just sometimes disappear flake or ghost without explanation? Or maybe the same excuse? I hear this all the time in friendship groups that I pass through. They're like, Yeah, we invite Greg all the time. Greg will probably come like one of the five times. He'll say he'll go, but he'll only go one of the five times. Yeah, Greg, that's fucking toxic. I'm gonna tell you why. So this inconsistent behavior, this flakiness, it makes you seem unpredictable. And it leaves people feeling anxious. Like they don't know what version of you they're gonna get. On the flip side, maybe you're overcommitting. Do you put high expectations on yourself? Or do people put high expectations on you for what you should provide to this relationship, friendship, family ship? Are those expectations making you feel like you're not enough? I say this because I have a really good friend of mine here in Colombia. She's amazing, she's a powerhouse. She goes to every single event, every invite, every volunteer experience you can think of in our group. I'm in a group, it's called Tercera Cultura. We're a bunch of Colombians that either were born or grew up abroad and we decided to come back. And she's she's a big intriguable part of it. She's always there. She never flakes. But in doing so much, she's never on time. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but when she does show up, she's tired. You can tell there's like a million things going through her head. And this does beget resentment. I can see resentment going towards her because they don't know if she's 100% there. Or maybe she's going on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. She's not fully present. And at the same time, I can imagine for her feeling resentment for the people around her. They just don't get it how much she puts into this, how much she's sacrificing. And that leaves a very toxic cycle. So with this friend of mine, I do find myself constantly reminding her to take breaks because lack of consistency, and I it's not in her case, it's not lack of consistency in terms of showing up, but that emotional exhaustion, like that tiredness, the lack of presence, can be exhausting not just for her, but the people around her. The antidote here, if it's not obvious, is set realistic expectations and set boundaries. What do I need to expect from myself and others in which we both feel safe, seen, and present? And the most important part, express that to others. I find it hilarious when people set silent boundaries. Yeah. And then people cross them. And then that person expects them to know that they're crossing them. I cannot tell you how this grinds my gears. I'll get in a I'll have a therapy office and my clients will tell me that that someone in in their life is crossing boundaries. I'm like, did you tell them? Did you tell them that was not okay? Especially when it's like a family member and it was like a behavior that has been going on for a long time. And in therapy, we discovered that that makes the person really uncomfortable. And I'm like, great, time to set a boundary. I set a boundary fix. Okay, did you tell them about this boundary? No. Did you did you set a consequence for this boundary? No. Okay, so what changes are you expecting exactly? Yeah. I do call out my clients. They love and hate it. They some clients literally seek me out. A lot of people seek me out because I tend to be a little bit more on the spicy side. I will call out your shitty behavior and toxic behavior with kindness. But this is just an example, like how we'll come off in the therapy session, just to just to give you a little taste of the figs. Figs are delicious, by the way. Um, because I am delicious. Well, the next one is emotional withdrawal and stonewalling. Emotional withdrawal and stonewalling are similar, but not the same. Emotional withdrawal is like subtly like pulling away affection to express displeasure or a form of punishment. Like one day you're so affectionate and generous with your feelings, and the next moment you're like distant and cold. Stonewalling, on the other hand, is like the complete shutting people out. It's refusing to communicate, the silent treatment. And both leave people around them such an emotional limbo. And it leaves people like just scrambling to figure out what's wrong. And it's this also makes them feel like affection is conditional on your mood, that they shouldn't set you off, that they should walk on eggshells. I'm gonna tell you, this type of behavior does push people away. I'm going to ask the people who are listening about this particular one. Have you noticed that your friendships tend to be short term? I find that the emotional withdrawal pokes, like they will come back and be like, Yeah, no, everything's fine, and like pretend like everything's like they didn't just ghost their friends for two weeks and like wants to go to the same level of play and affection, and no, that gives people like bad emotional whiplash. You know, that will have you being invited out less and less. It does do that. So, in terms of the antidote for this one, the Gottmans, I am citing them a lot for this particular episode, but because they've been doing this for a long time and they know what they're talking about. So the Gottmans suggest that stonewalling is actually us feeling overwhelmed with feelings, and the focus should actually be on self-soothing. In my experience, being a therapist, I did a lot of intensive outpatient therapy. So I worked a lot with addiction and I've worked a lot with personality disorders in particular. And I found that DBT, which is called dialectical behavioral therapy, has a lot of interventions that teaches people how to self-soothe and how not to react in a way that is very destructive whenever they're just emotionally triggered. So, how does this look like in real life? Like if you take notice that you are emotionally withdrawing from others, focus on coping. But here's the most important piece tell the people around you that you are coping. So they're not scrambling trying to figure it out for you. And then tell them once you're done self-soothing, or I'm also in I I love EFT emotion-focused therapy. I love co-regulation. Ask them for help and self-soothing if they can, so that you can address and better understand what exactly got you here in a constructive manner. The next one, it's called, and I am so guilty of this. I know, mother. I just did it there. Yes, mother, I am guilty of this. I know I am passive aggressive. This is me. In my personal life, I am so passive aggressive, guilty as charged. I'm working on this. I have worked on this tremendously, and I have improved tremendously. Just ask my sister. Hello, Sissy. I love you. So instead of saying what we really mean, that's my awkward smile. We hint and we drop. Comments and we hope the other person will just get it. Like you like that little shoulder thing I did? Just get it, okay? I want you to just get it. And this really creates confusion and distance. If I feel like the person, every time I talk to them, they are just doing this subtle attack at me, or I'm feeling attacked, but I just can't quite identify it. Because the thing with passive aggressiveness is that it's so opaque. You can't really, you can't really address it without saying, like, hey, you're being passive aggressive, and that just makes us more passive aggressive. So this one, I will say the antidote is psychotherapy. A good therapist will note when you're being passive aggressive. But in terms of how it looks like in a relationship, or ooh, my favorite, posting cryptic Instagram stories and not telling your situationship why you're upset. This really builds up resentment and it completely avoids direct conflict. And here's the thing is like when you avoid conflict, you also create more fear in yourself and others for this conflict. Yeah. Not only would this make this huge, some insurmountable wall much higher for yourself, now others around you are like, oh, this must be a big deal. I don't know if I can talk about this. Yeah, that's what passive aggressive does. Like I said, I'm guilty of this one, so I can talk in depth about it without really citing my sources because you don't really need it. I am the source. I am the source of the passive aggressive around me. I know I can see my mommy issues coming out right now. Next one is jealousy and envy. With my social anxious folks, socially anxious folks, I talk about this a lot. That social comparison is really what begets like low self-esteem and jealousy. When we don't have an objective measure to determine our self-worth, rather than create self-worth in ourselves, which is so complex and unmeasurable, we use social constructs to compare ourselves to others. So if I am particularly self-conscious of my appearances, my attractiveness, or how appealing I am, I am going to look at how many followers I have. I'm going to compare my followers to the followers of somebody else. And by looking at this, this form of measure that's not really a measure of what you really want to measure, it creates further insecurity, jealousy, and a lot of times controlling behaviors as a way of avoiding these deep-seated feelings. In terms of antidote here, I want you to practice gratitude. When you practice gratitude, you really center it around your personal journey with truthfulness. It doesn't allow room for comparison. And I know that's not enough because I'm talking about deep-rooted insecurity. And when we're talking about deep-rooted insecurity, there's something you should seek a therapist for. The next toxic trait is blaming boundary violations. Are we masters of deflecting? This can look like someone who brings up all environmental factors or self-diagnose for their shitty behavior. I bring this up because I recognize that hurt people hurt people, but that doesn't excuse someone from continuing to hurt us after we stated it like a million times. This is like not owning up to our mistakes and makes others the villains and themselves the victims. I say this is like um kind of like controversial because I hear all the time in my therapy office, it's like, oh, it's because I have this, I have this, or because they have this. They're giving diagnoses that I did not use or have not said. They diagnose the people around them or they diagnose themselves. And a diagnosis, and this is like kind of like stated in the DSM 5, may impair social functioning, but it does not give you an excuse to completely impair others. I'm gonna repeat that. And that's that's part of the diagnosis. Like maybe you won't catch certain social cues or there's some reactivity, but it does not excuse you continuously impairing others and hurting others. Last one but not least, gaslighting. This one's a serious one, and this one you will see a lot when we're talking about emotional abuse. And it's an emotional manipulation tactic that makes someone question their memory and perception. Sometimes is as simple as saying, I never said that just to avoid conflict, but over time it erodes trust completely. I mean, I can't trust someone who always makes me feel like I can't trust myself. Gaslighting like does require therapy, it does because it dives into attachment, conflict avoidance, power, and control. And if any of these things, all the things I've I've said before resonate with you, I think it's really important time to recognize that you may be toxic or the people around you might be toxic. And that's something we need to start addressing. So, can I heal and can I still be toxic while healing? As you've noticed, most of the toxic behaviors that I've said has an antidote. As a sex therapist, I am always going to recommend therapy that dives into our relationship patterns and how attachment impacts us. So I am going to recommend a therapist that does DBT and EFT, especially when it comes to DBT and emotional regulation and managing impulses and self-destructive patterns. DBT is great for that. If you're unsure about starting your healing journey in that regard, I want you to ask yourself, and these are things that we can journal. By we, I mean you, you're the listener. Do I feel like my relationships tend to be short term? Is there always drama? Do I feel like I can share good news with those around me? For my Latin folks, or do I feel like there's my lojo? Do I feel genuinely happy for those around me? Or do I end up comparing myself to them or worse, wishing them failure? Shad and Freud. I think that's how you say in German is when you wish people ill. And I this is my personal rule with social media. If I don't feel genuinely happy for you when you post good news about yourself in your story or in your timeline, I will unfollow you. I do it for the both of us because either I'm bringing in that negative, like that negativity with my unresolved issues or mood, or maybe there's something about this ephemeral relationship that's keeping me stuck in this negative pattern. Does this mean I cut people off from my life as I heal? Not really, not necessarily. My experience, just being a therapist, being a person, is that when my clients get healthier and when they start their healing girl era, my my boys do say that. My boys, as in my male clients, do say that. Like they're in their healing girl era. They start outgrowing certain relationships, they naturally like fall apart. Or what I see a lot, and I and I this is the best part, is that as they're growing, as they're healing, it inspires those around them to heal and grow to catch up with them because they know that they will be left behind if they don't. And this also extends into our communities. I I noticed that people are becoming much more open about being in therapy and holding each other accountable. A couple weeks ago, I was invited to a house party of a good friend of mine. I couldn't go, he lives in New York, and he successfully completed therapy. We were all excited for him, we were all proud of him. And this is the coolest part. So, in this party, he invited his guests to write down their ferret quotes and life advice on small pieces of paper, and then we'll join others in like this big collage, and it was just magical. And so the next question I also get a lot is so how do we invite softness? Softness comes from self-compassion and mindfulness. There's a lot of truth in belief that external changes start with the internal change when we really start to look at ourselves with eyes of non-judgment and compassion and kindness, then we start expecting that from others. So I ask you, are we able to lovingly embrace ourselves even when we're in emotional pain? Can we touch ourselves softly? No. Okay, I have an exercise for you. I actually picked this exercise, this intervention from the spiritual community, and I use it in my sex practice because you know this is a sex therapy podcast. So of course I'm gonna include some sex therapy here. I love you, spiritual girlies. Besitos. So this exercise really integrates affirmations, mindfulness, and playfulness, and playfulness, playfulness is such a big part of sex therapy. And so this is called a self-love shower or bath. I want you to set the mood in your bathroom, dim the lights if you have the ability to dim your lights, light the candles, incorporate smells to you, means softness and tenderness. This can be candles, bath bombs, or essential oils, or my personal favorite eucalyptus. I am a whore for eucalyptus. I love it. I love it. No disrespect to my vanilla girls. I am not a vanilla girl or a lavender girl. Some people really like lavender and vanilla. Nah, eucalyptus. Oh my god. When Bath and Body Works has like that sale, I go straight to the stress relief candle. Not necessarily because I'm stressed. I mean, I am stressed a lot, but it's because it's eucalyptus. I think it's eucalyptus and lemongrass. Oh my god. I love that smell. So if you're like me, eucalyptus, and run water warm and start lathering yourself with praise while you're also lathering yourself with soap and suds. And in the meantime, praise your body, what the body does for you, and uh give yourself compliments. This may sound really silly, and it can really feel like that in the moment, but if that really if it's really hard for you, then it might mean that it really is hard for you to be tender with yourself. And maybe that means you need to do some more of this practice and more of softness into your everyday. And a bath and a shower is a really good start. So to finally answer that question, can we heal and still be toxic? The truth is, yeah. Healing is not about flipping the switch and suddenly becoming perfect, it's about catching ourselves and like these little toxic patterns that we find ourselves before they turn into this giant snowball avalanche. It's about choosing softness where we once chose control, it's about asking for help, setting boundaries, and being honest when we fall short. Being toxic doesn't mean you're unworthy of love, it means you're human. And being human means you can grow. So let's retire the badge of La Toxica. Let's take off that shirt. Hey, I don't know, maybe do something with it. And instead, let's make softness, accountability, and compassion, the new markers of strength. And I say this and I extend this to my Latin community.